A/66/269 conflict information about recurrent attacks on schools and recurrent attacks or threats of attacks against protected persons in relation to schools. The Security Council’s monitoring and reporting mechanism has already played an important role in the identification of grave violations committed against children in armed conflict, and continuing and growing attention to attacks against schools will be vital to enhance protection of the right to education. To further ensure accountability, the capacity of domestic and international justice systems must also be enhanced, allowing for the prosecution of perpetrators, including non-State actors. 73. Beyond ensuring accountability for attacks against schools, targeted efforts are also required to prevent the occurrence of attacks against schools and other education institutions and to prepare them for situations of insecurity in order to minimize the damage armed conflict may cause. Finally, dedicated efforts are required to assist victims in their recovery and to ensure appropriate individual and collective reparation for these education-related violations. C. Preparing education systems to cope with natural disasters 74. The increasing number of natural disasters must not be ignored by those in charge of education systems. Schools not only play a crucial role in preparing communities to be more resilient in such situations, but also need to be adequately prepared to minimize the harm that natural disasters may eventually cause to their own functioning. Thus, specific attention to the education sector is required in the development of overall disaster risk reduction strategies. At the same time, schools must develop and adopt systematic safety and security measures adapted to the specific circumstances they face. 75. Schools are often not constructed or maintained to be disaster resilient. An extensive consultation with children around the globe resulted in the recent preparation of a children’s charter for disaster risk reduction, 55 which highlights the need for schools to be safe and education not to be interrupted. INEE coordinated the preparation of guidance notes on the necessary steps to ensure the construction of safer schools and the adaptation of existing ones. 56 A major effort is needed to build technical capacity for, and ensure the adoption of, safer standards for education infrastructure to avoid tragedies where seismic or other hazards take the lives of large numbers of children in unsafe schools. 76. Attention is being paid also to the use of schools as a platform to increase the preparation of learners and education staff for disasters and their aftermath. Several countries have included disaster risk reduction elements in their school curriculum, 57 others have considered making disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation a national education priority. 58 __________________ 55 56 57 58 18 Children’s Charter — an action plan for disaster risk reduction by children for children, available from www.childreninachangingclimate.org. Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, Guidance Notes on Safer School Construction, 2009. Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, “Aligning regional and global disaster risk reduction agendas; Summary of key regional political commitments & disaster risk reduction priorities”, 2011, p. 20. Ibid., p. 25. 11-44589